How was he going to forget Daniella and concentrate on work? It was like ordering your heart not to beat so your lungs could function.
Eventually, they rolled out of bed and he let his wife make him pancakes. It beat an energy bar by quadruple. Her coffee, as always, was amazing. He hadn't enjoyed it with her since the first time she'd made it after he fell asleep at his desk. But he never left the house without a full travel mug. Somehow it had become part of his routine to drink it on the way to work. The empty mug sat on his desk all day and the sight of it made him smile.
"What should we do with all this borrowed time?" he asked her and forked another bite into his mouth as they sat at the bistro table in the breakfast nook.
Daniella peered at him over her coffee mug. "Is that what it is? Borrowed?"
"Well...yeah." Something in her frozen posture tipped him off that he might have stumbled into quicksand. "The initiatives I have going on at the office didn't magically disappear. I'm putting them off until Monday."
"I see."
"You sound disappointed." The next bite didn't go down so well. He could stand a lot of things, but Daniella's disappointment was not one of them.
She shook her head, long brown hair rippling the way it had this morning over his shoulder. "Just trying to interpret your phrasing. Borrowed implies you'll have to pay it back at some point. I don't want you to have to do that."
"I made the decision to spend the weekend with you. I wanted to. Don't feel guilty."
Her eyebrows lifted. "I don't. I mean I wish you didn't have to choose. Like you've got a lot of balls to juggle and I'm the one you happened to grab."
"What other choice do I have, Daniella?" Suddenly frustrated, he dropped his fork into the middle of his half-eaten pancakes. "I have a company to run. But I'm here with you now, aren't I? I'm juggling the best I can."
It was the voice of his worst fears-that he would drop a ball. Or all of them. He was horrible at juggling.
She laughed. "Yes, you're here, but it doesn't seem like either of us are fond of the juggling. Isn't there a way to whittle down the number of balls until you can hold them all in your hand? Maybe you can hire some additional staff members or change your focus."
"You're telling me to scale back my involvement in Reynolds Capital. Take on fewer partners."
His gut clenched at the mere thought of how quickly the company would dissolve if he did what she suggested. Venture capital was a carefully constructed illusion of leveraged moving parts. Like a Jenga puzzle. Move one piece the wrong way and the whole thing crashed into an ugly pile.
"I don't know what would work best. But you do." Casually, she sipped her coffee. "Why don't you try it? Then you don't have to borrow time from work to spend it with me."
Really? She'd morphed into the opposite of an understanding wife who forgave her workaholic husband's schedule. He'd married her specifically to avoid this issue. Now she'd joined the ranks of every other woman he'd ever dated.
"I'm the Reynolds in Reynolds Capital. I spent a decade building the company from nothing and-" Quickly, he squashed his temper. Give a woman an inch and forget a mile-she'll take the circumference of the Earth instead.
"Forgive me if I overstepped. You were the one who said you wanted to do things differently and I was offering a solution. Less juggling would be different." She had the grace to smile as she covered his hand with her more delicate one. But he wasn't fooled. She had more strength in one pinky than most men did in their whole bodies. "I only meant to point out we all have choices and you make yours every day. That's all."
"Uh..." His temper fizzled. She'd only been trying to solve a problem he'd expressed. "Fair enough."
"Let's forget this conversation and enjoy our weekend."
Somehow, he had a feeling it wasn't going to be that simple. The die had been cast and she'd made a point with logic and style. Much to his discomfort.
True to his word, Leo didn't so much as glance at his phone or boot up his laptop once. He kept waiting for jitters to set in, like an addict deprived of his fix. The absence of being plugged in should be taking a toll. It wasn't.
He wrote it off as a keen awareness that he owed Daniella his attention until Monday morning. And then there was her gift for distraction. By midafternoon, they were naked in the warmed spa adjacent to the pool. He easily forgot about the blinking message light on his phone as they christened the spa.
He'd immersed himself in his wife's deep water and surfacing was the last thing on his mind.
So it was a bit of a shock to join Daniella in the media room for a late movie and have her announce with no fanfare, "You need to call Tommy Garrett."
"Tommy? Why? How do you know?" Leo set down the bottle of wine and stemware he'd gone to the cellar to retrieve and pulled the corkscrew from his pocket.
"He's been trying to reach you all day. He called my cell phone, wondering if you'd been rushed to the hospital."
About a hundred things careened through his head, but first things first. "How does Tommy have your cell phone number?"
Anger flared from his gut, as shocking as it was powerful.
"Don't wave all that testosterone in my face. How do you imagine he RSVP'd for your party if he didn't have my cell phone number?" She arched a brow. "Pony Express?"
His stomach settled. Slightly. He eased the cork from the bottle and poured two glasses. Wine scraped down his throat, burning against the shame already coating it. "I'm sorry. I don't know where that comes from."
"It's okay. It makes me all gushy inside to know you care." She giggled at his expression. "The movie can wait. Call Tommy. It seemed rather urgent."
Grumbling, he went in search of his phone and found it on the counter in the kitchen. Yeah, Tommy had called a time or twelve. Four text messages, one in all caps.
He hit Callback and shook his head. Kids.
"Leo. Finally," Tommy exclaimed when the call connected. "My lawyers got all their crap straightened out. I'm going with you, man. Let's get started taking the world by storm."
Leo blindly searched for a seat. His hand hit a bar stool at the kitchen island. Good enough. "You're accepting my proposal?"
"That's what I said, isn't it? Why didn't you answer your phone, by the way?" Munching sounds filled a sudden pause. Tommy lived on Doritos and Red Bull, which Leo always kept on hand at the office in case of impromptu meetings. Thankfully, there'd be a lot more of those in the future. "Took me forever to find Dannie's number again. I didn't save it to my contacts."
"I'm taking some..." Leo's mouth dried up and he had to force the rest. "Time off."
This was it-the Holy Grail of everything he'd worked for. Now Leo would find out if he was as good as he thought he was at selecting a winner. But not today. He'd have to sit on his hands for the rest of the weekend.
"That's cool. We can talk mañana."
It was physically painful for Leo to open his mouth and say, "It'll have to be Monday."
"Seriously?" Tommy huffed out a noise of disgust that crawled up Leo's spine. "Well, I gotta say. I'd tell you to piss off, too, if I had a woman at home like Dannie. They sure don't make many of 'em like that. I'll be by on Monday."
Leo bit his tongue. Hard. Because what could he say to refute that? Daniella was the reason Leo couldn't talk shop on a Sunday when normally no hour of the day or night was too sacred to pour more cement in the foundation of Reynolds Capital Management's success.
But dear God, it was difficult to swallow.
Even harder was the task of sitting next to his wife on the plush couch in the media room and not asking her for leeway on his promise to spend the weekend with her. He did it. Barely. And insisted Tommy's call was unimportant when she asked.
Why had he told her he was taking the whole weekend off? She would have been happy with just Saturday. It was too late now. After her speech about choices, he couldn't imagine coming right out and saying he was picking work over her.